Normally I like Joel Connelly's Op-Ed pieces in the Seattle PI. Sunday's column, however, is full of the same sort of twisted logic and failed half-truths that I would expect from the Taliban and other abrahamaic evangelicals that I had to write him a letter.

I must write to you to say that in this column, you have truly
disappointed every reader in this house. Normally, we find your
columns cogent, insightful and instructive even if we feel your
premises are misinformed or your conclusions flawed. However, this
column is so far below your normal standards we wonder if you actually
wrote it.

To compare religious superstitionists to courageous civil disobediers
standing up to the material horror of western imperialism, or brave
individuals standing true to their ideals against the hysteria of
McCarthyism is an analogy that entirely fails by any account of logic.
The most grotesque perversion of rationalism has to be the argument
that opposing the unfettered, legal distribution of a particular drug that
is relevant to a certain segement of the population is no
different than struggling for access for a drug for a different set of
patients. Excuse me? Remove the religiousostiy from your arguments,
and there's nothing left. The last time I read the Constitution, it
said we all have a right to be free from religion's influence in
government. That means free from your religion, too, Joel. NARAL et al
are not trying to tell you what to believe, but ensuring people who
believe differently than you can share public and professional spaces
without undue and unfair hindrance.

In this day and age, to deny healthcare to a class of customers based
on a particular set of "morals" that have their roots in the same
oppressive idealogies that lead to the Dark Ages of Europe is nothing
short of criminal. By your logic, we should praise the catholics who
aided and abetted the nazi's because "they were following their
conscience". I can't follow you down that dark and slippery path, and
fortunately some people in our government see the bigger issues at
stake. In my job, my wife's job, and everyone I know, we are asked to
put aside our feelings and leave our personal lives at home to fulfill
the duties required of us to earn our paychecks. What makes pharmacy
technicians any different? If they don't want to be asked to prescribe
a drug that may or may not prevent a pregnancy that may or may not
happen without intervention, they can find a job where they will not
be asked to do so.

But they keep coming back to their jobs at the dispensary, day after
day. It would seem to me that these pharmacy techs believe more
strongly in dollars than in their god.